7 Reasons to Remove "Link Building" from Our Vocabulary

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Double disclaimer: This really is my own opinion, and may not be the official position of either Moz or Distilled.

"We’ve only built high-quality links."

I see variations on this theme often; sadly, I see it most commonly in laments composed by those affected by Google’s Penguin update. After years of consulting, dozens of penalty-related questions in Moz’s Q&A, and careful consideration, I am convinced that the idea of "building links" has been heartbreakingly detrimental to our industry and many site owners. I will argue that everyone — marketers and SEOs included — would be better off if we stopped talking about building links altogether.

It may seem insane to many in the industry to speak of discarding "link building" as an action, goal, or job description. I certainly understand the objections, but I only ask that you consider the whole of my argument before coming to a conclusion.

Nothing above looks too controversial yet, but why then should we not focus on links? If links lead to higher rankings and eventually to profitability, we should build links, right? This makes sense until we expand the diagram.

Direct link building is a process that only a spammer or link buyer can do. I prefer "link earning" — a phrase I’ve borrowed from Danny Sullivan’s legendary rant and Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday — but I see no reason why our efforts and successes should be constrained by links. Some online marketing tactics may also contribute directly to rankings, and some definitely contribute directly to traffic.

Even those who neither spam nor buy links have become so focused on link acquisition that many de-emphasize or even ignore what comes before or after. We heard some amazing forward-thinking talks at Mozcon, almost all about real, legitimate, and sustainable marketing. Even then, we heard far more about the number of links obtained than we did about rankings, traffic, or profitability.

I am not suggesting that we stop caring about links. Link data can be used for many valuable tasks including the following:

Find external pages that appear to have generated awareness and increased visibility. We can, for example, use Open Site Explorer to understand industry challenges and past successes.

Provide valuable insights into campaigns that are still in progress.

Find potential marketing targets (e.g. those who shared a similar piece of content).

Explain current rankings.

There are plenty of additional reasons why link data is fantastic. I am merely suggesting we stop leading people to death by Penguin.

When we focus on links as a process and a goal, we're working towards the measurement rather than the goal the measurement was intended to measure. Profitability is the goal — events, guest posts, or content pieces are the methods and tactics to get there. If we achieve the goal through a combination of organic traffic, cross-coverage, and direct traffic, I doubt anyone will complain. We might even be more effective as marketers by considering more pieces in the puzzle.

2. Google wants to kill "link building" as a process

This isn't about being a "white hat" anything. I, for one, cringe when referenced as a "white hat" marketer — it stings like a label for someone adhering to dogma set forth by infallible Google. I’m with Dr. Pete on this hat nonsense. If I thought buying links was a smart risk-free way to make money, I would suggest we all buy links. I am simply a believer in sustainable marketing tactics.

"The philosophy that we've always had is if you make something that's compelling then it would be much easier to get people to write about it and to link to it. And so a lot of people approach it from a direction that’s backwards. They try to get the links first and then they want to be grandfathered in or think they will be a successful website as a result."
-Matt Cutts in an interview with Eric Enge

Matt says link building isn't inherently evil, but only when we get it mixed up. We run afoul of search engines only when we look at links with tunnel vision, as in the first diagram above, as an activity rather than an outcome.

We should care what Google wants, if only because it’s dangerous and difficult to fight against them in the long run. I once warned about what would eventually be called "Penguin" in March of 2012 — just one month before the first Penguin update — and met some strong resistance claiming Google would never penalize for links, but only devalue them.

It’s a mistake to underestimate what Google can and will do. Counter-spam might move slower than spam most of the time, but I suspect Penguin won't be our last reality check for artificial links.

3. Modern Google is not a link-counting machine

Regardless of what Google will do in the future, we should also consider what Google can already do today. What were links meant to measure in the first place? Why did Google use them, and how did they help? We know that links help to filter out the garbage on the web, and they are still heavily used because link data helps to measure the popularity and authority of a site and page.

We know Google understands more than followed links and anchor text. Embeds have been called "links for videos." Citations are "links for local." Google uses URL text for discovery, even if the text isn't an explicit link. The search engine has long understood which words are related to one another, and which brands relate to which words — as anyone who has used the Google keyword tool can attest. We just heard a presentation from Dr. Matt showing a correlation between social shares and brand mentions with rankings.

We don’t know everything about Google and the algorithm. Perhaps Google is using co-occurrence as a ranking factor, but can we really doubt the search engine looks at good-old-fashioned occurrence as a measuring stick for site authority and popularity? It’s not unlikely that Google is using a combination of data sources — mentions, links, offline brand metrics, etc. — to measure or confirm popularity.

We also need to back up and consider the degree to which popularity, awesome products, useful content and great web pages drive all popularity signals, and to what extent they are used by Google. Facebook likes correlate with site traffic whether Google ever looked at them or not. Even with great statistics and a few tests, we can’t be totally sure about how much Google uses which signal or under what circumstances. Why focus on simply building links when Google uses more than links? Why obsess over a small HTML element when we have the ability and skills to improve multiple metrics and build visibility with or without Google?

4. Qualifying "good links" doesn't stick

Perhaps "building links" isn't a bad idea as long as the links are good. Even though I agree, we still need to stop talking about building links. Even if we could list every possible quality that defines a "good link," we find that we have an overly-technical and roundabout way of saying "market to your audience."

No matter how many caveats we add, or how precisely and carefully we define "high-quality links," people still seem to come away with their own version of what a good link is. The value of a link is far less intuitive than the value of coverage and visibility.

Adria Saracino wrote an enormous post last year about nothing other than qualifying link prospects. More could have been written, but I’m not sure more could have been retained or recalled. To keep clients focused on the real goals rather than links, Adria has begun pushing internally and externally for a stronger focus on revenue rather than links alone.

Rankings and links are benchmarks, not processes — a way to track progress on the way towards our real goals of qualified traffic and sales.

5. Link obsession can hurt relationships

Asking people to add links, change the post, or edit their existing links can appear selfish and demanding. I believe most people who do so are not selfish people, but rather people whose success is measured in terms of links above all else.

... And now I want to remove any mention of the source. This is a ridiculous example, but illustrative of where "link building" has led us.

Sometimes building awareness with an audience is better than link building. Coverage and relationships with publishers leads to more coverage, awareness, and — yes — even more links. But once again, links are not the goal; they are merely one outcome and benefit of marketing with the goal of profitability.

If you do want to risk additional requests from those who have already been kind enough to cover your topic, take Phil Nottingham’s advice and offer something of value (in his example, HD quality video) in the process.

6. Focusing on links leads to missed opportunities

I was recently reminded of a short-term consulting project I worked on where a large client had dedicated as much as $20,000 per month and a full-time employee's time to buying and renting links. They hadn't been caught yet, and their rankings were relatively solid, but improvement was minimal. The total traffic from paid links — mostly footer links — was in the low thousands.

The company was so risk averse (a pet peeve of mine) that they were unwilling to stop because their competitors were also buying links. To my knowledge, we never convinced the client to spend half as much producing content or seeking real visibility.

Even giving the money away would be more effective marketing. What blogger wouldn't participate in a contest for a chance to win a free car? You could literally drop $20k in cash from your rooftop in a press event and generate more publicity, and probably from more and better sources if done well.

It’s true that the case above is the second or third most extreme example of link-centric myopia I’m aware of, but one need not look far to see less dramatic examples.

For instance, the cost of a typical unbranded guest blog post will also far exceed its value. From first contact to actual posting, the submission will easily take a few hours. More importantly, marketers focused on corresponding with blog owners for links are not focusing on building better businesses, products, content, or websites. The opportunity cost for tactics where link building is the only goal can be enormous — and why, when even guest posting could bring both links and awareness?

7. Marketers should differentiate their services from spammers

The results of emphasizing link building are predictable: marketers new to the industry hear so much about link building that they become desperate for links and turn to spam and paid links. Similarly, clients hear regularly that they need links, and set link goals for their employee or agency. Then, Penguin unleashes its wrath almost exclusively on those who focus on link-building as a process. And, we wonder why it’s so hard to change the perception of SEO in the industry.

Consider this, if you are "link building," you’re either spamming links or doing online marketing. Those who are practicing sustainable marketing tactics may do well to distance themselves and their activities from spammers using the same terms.

So, what should we do instead?

"Link building" is a phrase used by most industry experts, many of whom I respect deeply. Unfortunately, their use of such terms grants a sort of license, shelter, and reassurance to people doing a very different kind of link building. The ambiguity can take new marketers some time to figure out, and our industry and personal reputations suffer at the hands of ineffective marketing.

Among those who agree with the philosophy presented above, the required change is simple: it's just a matter of using new words. Many others may find adjustment more difficult; I hope and believe they will also find it more rewarding.

Use better words, track better metrics

When we talk about obtaining visibility, awareness, traffic, or coverage, we immediately ensure we and our clients are talking about similar goals. For processes, we can talk about the actual tactic, whether it's outreaching for an infographic or hosting a webinar.

If, for some reason, we need to refer to these processes in aggregate, terms like "inbound marketing," "online marketing," and "content marketing" might be right, depending on the breadth and focus of services offered.

Changing our choice of words admittedly has less impact than changing what we do, but even altering the use of words can have a surprising effect. "What can we do to get links?" sets an unnecessary and artificial constraint on marketing activities, thereby limiting our marketing to a few activities and making the goal of links explicit.

For the last several months, I've been trying to ask better questions. "What can we do to increase visibility and generate awareness? What can we do to drive more qualified traffic? What can we do to increase profit per qualified visitor?" Followed links may be a facet of the resulting strategy, but they are unlikely to be its entire purpose.

We ensure that we're building better businesses when we track the results of our efforts and report on their impacts. To ensure we are working effectively it's wise to continue tracking the places we have requested and received online coverage, but we're more interested in revenue first, traffic second, and rankings third. Coverage (sometimes as standard links) and rankings matter, but only to show progress while working towards traffic and revenue.

Do better marketing

I'm truly excited that we have the skills and knowledge to do something better in a way that other marketers cannot. We have tools that other marketers don't use in their research, giving us insights into what works before we start building or emailing anyone. We understand the Internet, search engines, and traffic generation. The future looks bright if we can get our priorities straight.

Awareness over links

It is easier to slip links into posts about diverse topics than it is to write a post about a product, service, or company. We all know the kind of guest post I'm talking about: guest posts on mommy blogs that suddenly include suspiciously-targeted anchor text. Posts on pet blogs somehow slipping in a link to a web hosting company. They look like this:

It's about the company, branded and obvious. It was no doubt many times harder to obtain this coverage, but it builds awareness, authority, and some links while it's at it.

You don't need to get in front of the Journal — you just need to get in front of your target audience. Find out where your audience is, where they are reading, and then talk to them. Build or say something that they will care about, and find interesting, surprising, and useful. If your audience reads mommy blogs, post on mommy blogs. You can build more awareness and more links if you make the posts about your company, product, service, or content rather than sneaking a link in. Such guest posts require more effort and knowledge, but they can actually accomplish goals worth caring about.

Visibility over authority

Imagine a hypothetical situation where you could choose to place an article in one of the following locations:

A large news site, Domain Authority 95, with millions of readers. Your article would be posted in a subcategory of a section where at most 500 people might read it.

A medium-sized blog, Domain Authority 65, with roughly 10,000 readers per day. The blog posts once per day, and your article would be on the home page for the full day.

Most in our industry would choose (1) in a heartbeat. For the reasons outlined above, I would undoubtedly choose (2). We should seek visibility in what we do, even if we sometimes cant get followed links out of it. Even if the resulting Page Authority of the linking page is lower in the end, there is value in higher visibility insofar as there is value in a site's offerings.

Audiences over rankings

Businesses like MailChimp and Dropbox define their industries. Their brand names dwarf the generic/unbranded terms, most of which they rank for anyway. Their brands overshadow even terms that are broader than the entire industry. Dropbox has more searches than even the most ambiguous terms, dwarfing single-word searches like "storage." MailChimp doesn't need to rank first for "mailing list management," but it would make Google look bad to do otherwise.

No doubt both receive millions of visits from Google, and no doubt the vast majority are branded. Before posting a mediocre post on a mediocre blog with an anchor text link tucked in the back, consider the opportunity cost of seeking keyword rankings rather than audiences.

Better businesses over all

Respected venture capitalist Paul Graham is fond of saying, "make something people want." Hearing this phrase as advice more than once makes it instantly sound trite, but the underlying philosophy is actually profound. "Of all the potential advice, that is the one thing you should do." Not build links, not rank highly in Google, but make something people want; you will love your job, and people will love your company.

This philosophy applies to products, services, and business models, but it also applies to marketing and content. SEOs and other digital marketers can and should help make businesses better. We can provide valuable insights into building better websites, better content, and better messaging. When we have built something people want, they will want to share what we have made and said.

About Carson-Ward —

Carson Ward has worked as a marketing manager at Clearlink and as a consultant with Distilled. In 2017 he founded a small company specializing in affiliate marketing.

As I told you privately, I love this post. It's saying exactly what I have been thinking for a long time - when we focus on one tactic, it quickly becomes dimishing returns and we fail to see where other areas might be driving better business and we could show greater return.

I have a client that has been making this turn for a while now, and we recently started CRO on their site. In short, in the first two weeks, they've seen a 1.4% increase in their conversion rate, which for this client amounted to an extra $7,400+ and an increase in per-visitor value of 66%+, from $40/visitor to $54+ per visitor. Now that's a win :-)

Hey John, we've seen that too. We've been focused on building a brand instead of building links and it's really paid off. In the last 6 months our traffic has doubled and our conversions are only slightly behind. Turns out being something users wants is a lot better than being something that can be boosted artificially.

It's not even that simple. Building a brand definitely does generate leads, but with a brand comes links and with links come rankings. And the interesting truth is that Grovo (full disclosure: I'm an advisor) now ranks for many more searches than just a few head terms. Traffic is way up, as Caroline said, and their traffic driving terms (many of them strong head terms) are diversified.

The thing is when you deal with higher level clients they usually have already been doing CRO for a number of years. Sure if the business has not set up the website from the beginning with the correct foundations my advice is to invest in design and on site before you even engage with off site. When the visitors pick up you engage CRO and promotion even further. Most of the businesses who engage with link building want awareness, they want PR, they want promotion. Some businesses have the budget for these areas and it is something that they require.

It's true, but from my experience (and I bet yours) links, promotion, and PR can get you more traffic, but once you're starting to level off on traffic and are coming up with new ways to generate traffic, investing in CRO will help you convert more visitors and therefore make a lot more money.

I'm planning to use this case study in the future to pitch CRO a lot more :-)

Totally agree with you! Link Building should be eradicated, SEOs must start thinking about link earning by producing link worthy content consistently. Social share on Facebook, Google Plus +1's, Twitter Retweets etc., are more than quality links from relevant sources as these are the result of a good content which people wanted to share with their peers or pals personally. These are valued the most than some other bunch of links. Understanding What people wants and to be the best resource for them to refer at any time on a relevant or particular niche is what can distinguish a good site from the average ones.

I think this is exceptionally well argued and I broadly agree with you.

Just to play devil's advocate for a moment - I wonder if there is a specific value for the term link building, in the context of educating those working in PR, creative etc about the importance of link acquisition in order to see greater search engine visibility. We've both seen countless situations where a creative agency has done awesome work and then utterly failed to get the link attribution they deserve for the piece, by virtue of crappy technical implementation. While it might be argued that Google will eventually find a way to reward this stuff without relying on link metrics, there is surely no harm in ensuring you get the links you deserve from the content and great PR work you might be doing. In order to ensure that happens, people like you and I spend a lot of time educating other teams on why links are important and how to accrue them off the back of the other marketing work you're doing. For this, "link building" is an important concept. While it could be argued that "link acquisition" is more appropriate, "link building" has stuck and as such, it's what we have to work with.

I wonder if, rather than the term itself, It's the concept of link building as an isolated activity that needs to die. Link Building can no longer be a line item on a companies budget - it needs to be an integrated process involving stake holders from numerous departments.

The challenge therefore isn't so much in what SEO's are doing, but rather in the way organisations are structuring their marketing departments. For those of us who preach "link building" as an integrated activity, our biggest hurdle is convincing companies to change their structure and spend money in different areas.

Well said, Phil. I recall something from your presentation along similar line. The definition of "link building" as something you add in to a creative campaign is very different from the typical definition. I admittedly don't have a better term for it. Mostly, though, "link building" is seen as a process under which something like creative and outreach would both fall.

I think your suggestion is basically what I'm getting at in my first point. "Link building" (unless one is a spammer) shouldn't be a line item or ongoing point on some project plan, nor should it be the sole goal of an activity. Sometimes we might even do something that doesn't result in links at all.

We're also in a chicken-and-the-egg situation where companies think they want link building - because we tell them that's what they need. I'd say the experts should be the ones to show them the right metrics, goals, and processes.

I totally agree with this concept. ---> "The challenge therefore isn't so much in what SEO's are doing, but rather in the way organisations are structuring their marketing departments. For those of us who preach "link building" as an integrated activity, our biggest hurdle is convincing companies to change their structure and spend money in different areas."

The biggest issue I believe in terms of link building, is teaching our customers what is content and how to create it easily and efficiently.

Link Earning is difficult if only you are not seriously able to do a very well done audience targeting before even starting your site (or "re-thinking" the strategy of your site).

And it is also because of that that the Inbound way of thinking is so useful... and it is not really something new, but real marketing, with the boost of being supported by the data driven skills SEO (should) always have had.

Starting from a correct audience targeting, you can develop your site visibility promotion using every possible channel, earn links and get free of cheap (or not so cheap) fast but dangerous tactics and, something so needed in every search market, disrupting the black link selling market.

I totally agree about starting with research and understanding with the audience. I'm surprised everyone seems to think I'm suggesting using the term "link earning." It is an improvement, but not really what I'm suggesting. We could talk about online promotion, inbound marketing, content marketing, traffic acquisition, audience acquisition, online marketing, etc.

As I said, I see no reason to continue to constrain ourselves to marketing activities that get followed links, and I don't think it wise to continue focusing so on links at the exclusion of other equally (if not more important) goals.

Def had thought of some of these sentiments before. I think I'm more of a traditional PR dude, which seems to attempt to attain the same goals of links. I figure links -> better placement -> more traffic/exposure -> (hopefully) more sales.

Why the f else would someone being employed by a marketing agency try to "scale" building links to obscure businesses other than due to the fact the client is paying them to do it. Until getting more links does not influence a jump in the SERs, I don't see it stopping regardless of what Google or anyone says. Even if I say some processes are not so great, the client pays money for it. If I say create great content, but can't show a definitive, 'if x then y' pattern, they're going to go with someone who can better do that (through link building).

I'm coming out with a post this week that champions audience over links. But, again, can I 'sell' my client on something that is not as tangible and direct in proving ROI?

It's not that I don't celebrate the way I go about thinking. My own personal blog is nothing to pat myself on the back about, but I did zero link building; I just tried to build my brand. But, I wasn't a paying client. I was patient and methodical. I couldn't guarantee my guest posts would be well received or receive links other than anchor links.. Content is a tougher sell. Ask people paying $30 or less for 'content.' ;)

Like it or not, link building is often 70-90% of SEO for some large international companies. Even if we supply great content ideas for articles, videos or infographics that would drive organic traffic and social shares, by the time is gets approval from the stakeholders, the marketing department, the legal department and the developers make it live in 2-3 months (if it's more complicated than a blog post) then the SEO person has only one thing left. Link building. Sponsored reviews, paid guest posts, paid social shares, paid directory submissions, etc. These companies compete for keywords like credit cards, car insurance, etc, and they can't be bothered with white hat SEO, as long as "good-old" link building works.

Got penalty? A few months on the second page until the market cools down and a few of the links are removed, then ask for reconsideration and also mention that they spend millions of Dollars on AdWords each year. Interestingly the penalty is removed and the page is back on the first page.

I hear you on the long delays and demands from senior stakeholders for quick results. From my experience with Enterprise companies in the past you have to find a value add which will allow you to get the business working for you. I mean you can go into a big business and get the PR team assisting SEO, get the design team assisting SEO, the social team, the tech team. Much of working with big business is building relationships and getting people to do things, that is probably the hardest part. To get results from big business you really need them to get involved with the SEO project, you need buy in from everyone if that is not possible then the project may not run effectivly.

Excellent post, Carson. For many of the reasons you've outlined, deciding what to call this activity is something we've struggled with at BuzzStream. Words matter a lot, and the term "link building" carries a lot of baggage.

The problem I have with the term "link earning" is that people misinterpret it to mean "just focus on creating great content." I realize that's not what you're recommending, but I think it's as ripe for misinterpretation as the term "link building" and this misinterpretation sets people up for failure. When talking about "link building" activities that involve outreach, I actually prefer the terms "content publicity" and "content promotion." I like this better because, in my view, there are two things you can do that work and are future-proof - create great content and promote it effectively.

The flip side to this is that people are familiar with the term and they know that links are still important. We've found that when we write about about content promotion on our blog (or content marketing, in general), we see a drop-off in both engagement and signups. It doesn't seem to matter what type of post it is, just the change in terminology impacts performance. Seems like the market isn't ready to give up on the term and we're not ready for a category creation effort, so we've stuck with it for now....and when we talk about it, we try to focus on the parts of it that we think add long-term value.

Great comment, Paul, and well said. There are more problems with "link earning," too: for example, people still think links are all that matter and all we're trying to accomplish if that's all we talk about. Even we might start to focus on links at the exclusion of all else. Personally, I've adopted more traditional marketing terms, talking about links sometimes and link building never.

Hi Carson, very interesting post. I hadn't thought much about the semantics before.

As a very recent blogger, I take the view that it's going to take years for me to rank for any of my major keywords, so I don't spend any time thinking about SEO in that way. Google isn't going going to give me any traffic this side of Christmas 2014, I reckon.

So my focus is on referrals and since there's only me creating content and I'm not very scalable, then I better make damn sure my content goes to places where there is a sizable, relevant and clicky audience. And it better be good content, too. Otherwise what's the point?

Is that link-building? Well yes, but I only ever think of it as traffic fishing. It's much more important for me to drop my juicy content bait into the right fishing hole so I can pull out a few fat ones.

If one hole gets me 1,000 visitors a day, how many more holes do I need?

Mmm... I just see one link to Distilled, and it is the consequence of a self-citation (it's to a post Carson himself wrote), which allows to dig deeper into the subject, hence I see it more like a classic curation link more than a subtle way of creating one.

Surely it is not like: Last day I wanted to buy something and saw a great organic search result of Google...

It's a good term, but do you think the focus on links is a bit more narrow than it needs to be?

I would still have posted this if all of the links were nofollow. In fact, I wish I had nofollowed the links back to Distilled to make the following point: there are activities worth doing even if no links are acquired.

@Carson Agreed - and yes the focus on links is more narrow than it needs to be. But Link Acquisition is a by-product of an overall strategy & process that should have a positive effect on business.

Links in this post - there are valid arguments that those links are built AND earned (+ relevant and useful too).

We do need a term for whatever this is though - whether we acquire links as a consequence or not - if it happens, we need a name for it. We need to quantify aspects of every campaign in order to improve upon them, and using an appropriate label is part of that.

But I guess the proper approach should be "We should upgrade ourselves to link earning (I Love this new term and would be happy to see a broad definition in the future) rather than link building"

I've been a marketer for 2-3 years but I don't have time to cope up with the trends and the things which is important on building a targeted audience and reading your points of view makes me eager to restart what I have started and create a community of trust to produce "link earning"

Also, I love how you visualize and approaches that we need not just to look for the future algorithm updates of Google but to look already on what they can do today!

Sophistication is brewing in the SEO community. On one hand you see companies like Moz.org and HubSpot embracing both traditional and new aged marketing strategies. I see these companies focusing more on brand awareness and sustainable online marketing methods, which, in my opinion, is the next generation of digital marketers.

On another end, you have one side of the community purely focused on link building, for the value of preforming well for targeted keywords and manipulating Google’s algorithm for better ROI.

At the end of the day our jobs as online marketers is to assist in creating an online environment that motivates the customer to action. Whether it is to get a customer to sign up for a newsletter, join an organization, or buy a pair of shoes; ROI is a huge consideration.

In terms of building long-term longevity and profitability for clients link building just isn’t enough. You have to cultivate a brand, which takes time and baby steps. It does happen overnight, but with an effective strategy you can start to define your goals and build steps to attain them.

It's all about branding and providing your audience a reason to visit your site. Link building, in its most basic form, can be achieved through software. While good branding (content, image, message) is accomplished through experience and human interactions.

A good analogy would be spending $10,000 on:

1. 1,000 - Hand Written Signs left at every intersection all over town.

2. 1 - 12'x24' Billboard professionally designed and displayed on a HIGH TRAFFIC freeway.

If you give people a reason to link they will link naturally. Spend your money efficiently and wisely. Ok now I need more coffee! But awesome article!

I think all this talk of the Death of Link Building is making all the "black hatters" giggle.

Just in the past couple of months, I, and other google+ forums, have seen many examples of brand new sites that suddenly show up on page 1 of the SERPs, with tens of thousands of spammy links. And their still there on page 1. It's difficult to explain to a client or boss that what that site is doing is wrong and "should" be penalized but isn't.
Meanwhile, another relatively new site, does 300 blog posts in 100 days, some real quality writing, and gets 0 quality backlinks "earned" and 0 change in rankings. Interesting, right?

Until there's a case study done showing Link Building is harmful 100% of the time, I would totally recommend it as part of your overall strategy.

Some industries/niches are just flat out more difficult to earn links for. Either the reader base isn't there or the ones that read aren't likely to write and link themselves. Like you said, 300 posts and no links and I believe it.

We noticed Google ranking some new competitor sites really high a couple weeks ago. They are gone now. Their link profile was almost non existent. I couldn't explain why it was there but was surprised when I saw it. Traditionally, it seemed like Google liked older content.

This doesn't speak to long term viability of the serps, though. One of my team mates has a client who was hit hard by Penguin last fall. The client was using spammy link building on mostly foreign websites by his previous seo company. His entire page was outdated and onsite was not where it needed to be. If content would have been a focus and not the "link building" the client would have seen absolutely no change in his serps.

I have seen this in our market with a large directory site that lists themselves as a restaurant and etc. They are not a restaurant, but Google hasn't made the connection yet. My guess is these sites drop off serps in the short term. That also has to do with whether the competition is building appropriate content as well, and AJ1534 has a valid arguement.

Managing your clients expectations, and also allowing for anomalies such as this has more to do with account management than the client's serps.

My point is not, "link building is dead," it's "only those who are spamming and buying links are really doing link building." There's a difference in philosophy that matters, too, but that's all in the last section of the post.

I'm sorry, but I can't help shake the vision of a bunch of people at a party, wearing smoking jackets, drinking brandy talking about what to appropriately call something without referring to it in a form that connotes what it really is, which is amassing quality links.

It sounds like biased semantics to me. "Link building, link acquiring, link [fill in the semantic blank]" to sound more authoritative on the subject while creating a false dichotomy. The false dichotomy being, "If you are link building, you are absolutely focusing on the WRONG thing and should stop! It is about content! ...and do you have any more scotch?"

Could not have this entire post been summed up with "You need links, yes, but don't focus on building links at the expense of creating quality content," and is it not already assumed that you push 10,000 spammy links?

Life isn't fair and it is especially not fair to those who have do their due dilligence. Call it what you will, in the end, you need your pile of links right next to all of the other things you've done right. Do it through quality content, excellent posts with targeted key words, semantically related words, latent semantic indexing, etc., in the end, the goal is to still get those relevant/qualified links to help maximize sales.

As AJ1534 said, "Some industries/niches are just flat out more difficult to earn links for...300 posts and no links and I believe it." Carson, you say, ""only those who are spamming and buying links are really doing link building.""

I'm sorry Carson, but it just sounds like you're trying to distance yourself from the ilk spammers who buy links (which is understandable) by changing the words of what you are doing (which is building more links). If the importance of acquiring more links wasn't important, then there would be no reason for MOZ to push their Open Site Explorer, with the label, "Research and compare backlinks with competitors for intelligent, targeted link building. Identify top pages, view social activity data, and analyze anchor text."

I couldn't agree more. Undoubtedly, as search improves, especially with things like Author Rank and other social ranking factors, links will become a dated ranking factor. I think it is wise to focus on inbound marketing as a whole rather than just as links or even SEO.

Couldn't agree more. Links as a ranking factor will stay. Google has been continually refining their algorithm so we can expect in the future that besides other reinforcing factors (social, content relevancy, authorship/publishership, user satisfaction, etc.) links would keep becoming better as a trust signal.

They might already even have something cooking with the data they've gathered from link disavow requests. Maybe. :)

I like it; isn't it strange that the industry at large attempts to impact one of Google's factor in determining relevance rather than trying to impact what the measurement was intended to measure? It's also my opinion that trying to build links without a corresponding change in other signs of authority is far less effective that it once was.

Hi Carson, i have pretty much stopped focusing on link building for around 6 months now (apart from the occasional guest post for brand building) . My main focus is blogging on my own site and earning backlinks from website owners as a reliable source. Seems to be working for me.

An interesting view point that is for sure, but the thing is in the end of the day Googles index is still highly tiered towards backlinks. The problem is people build links in a way which are un natural to the index and it just causes issues. My method of link building always has been to create value and create something which people will like. The thing is you can have a great product but if you do not have it out in the market and the community talking about it then no one will know about it. Link Building is more about generating relationships, generating high level PR, Generating a way for your brand to share a piece of content effectively. I mean most of the time you need to use common sense, I have never been one to race around and ask every linking site to change anchors and things like that it just isn't natural. The moral of the story is link building still has a few more years in my eyes if you are doing it correctly and at a higher level.

I wrote a post a number of years back where I argued SEO consultants would need to change role titles if they wanted to own more of the funnel. It seems to me the conversation is moving in that direction. The core reasons businesses take on marketing is to move the needle on business metrics. I can never see a day where a marketer get's a seat with the VP of Sales, CFO, CEO and is taken seriously when they are going through spreadsheets with the number of links they've built/earned/stolen. No one in senior roles talk in that language. They talk in revenue. My own journey from SEO to Marketing Director has taught me a lot on that side.

I still think a lot of this comes down to type of clients you work for and type of business you want to be. It make's sense for large agencies to move beyond the term "link building" so they can future proof their services around a core set of fundamentals that are not going to change every time Google decided to update their algorithm. But there are also a range of market segments, where "building" links still get's you results. These market segments are often in pretty niche areas where it's difficult to do all the kind of things you need to do to "attract" links. I think that's one of the core frustrations for a lot of businesses. It's the Coke effect. You go to conferences on social media, content marketing and you are shown the same examples time and again e.g. Coke, Redbull, that are not applicable to 90% of the companies in that room. It's same with the examples given for link earning.

At the end of the day, if you have provide services that map to a companies core metrics and show positive returns, you can probably call yourself anything you want. Most the education needed around these terms is on the client side and helping them to change their expectations on what they expect to get when they go looking for SEO/links.

With the new manner in which Google+ is tracking how we +1 and share a post on Google+ it would seem logical and eventual that social shares from a vetted Google+ ID will have major influence on your Authorship and Authority

This is a really well written, well argued article. Clearly the information in it is great for companies with a large budget/time/resources on their hands. What about SMBs though with small marketing budgets and little or no time/resources to execute such a strategy?

In his latest interview with Eric Enge, Matt Cutts says:
“Links are still the best way that we’ve found to discover that, and maybe over time social or authorship or other types of markup will give us a lot more information about that.” (10.7.13, http://bit.ly/174q7Ip)

We can definitely stop using the term "link building"... question is - so what if we do?

Recently I spoke about search engine optimization at an event. I was asked how I went about link building. My answer was simple..I don't do any link building at all. I was told; "No Way then you do not know SEO" "How can you have your websites ranking if you do none at all?" I stuck to my guns and explained that I let links naturally come to me and I decide if I want it or not. Glad you wrote this blog post. It is what I have been preaching for 15 years.

A topic which you have covered is really interesting. Moreover, Carson can you please tell me if we are building link bait strategy should we need to keep a variety of links in mind like some links from social media, some from the guest post, article, forum, give way and some different other platform to get linked. So is it fine to use this strategy for link building. Instead of rely on anyone.

If a "link bait" works well you should not think about its link profile at all, as it will have links from almost every channel.

The wrong mentality begins - IMHO - when you start thinking at "link bait" not as something that will bring you traffic, visibility and brand recognition but just links. If you think that way, yes, you will start pondering the % of different kinds of websites... falling into the "secret formula syndrome".

How would you even go about keeping a variety of link types in mind? Would you write/create something different if the audience was 100% bloggers? 100% Forum readers? Twitter followers? And even if you could do that, why would you want to limit yourself?

Great post, thanks! Sustainable marketing is all about making content people want and ensuring good visibility. In that way it's not only effective, but also fair towards the end-consumer. I expect trustworthiness and authenticity will become even more important in marketing the next few years, so the time is right for a similar online approach online. And as a marketer, I think it's also nice to work without any ethical dilemmas ;-)

Thanks for this great post. I think we are playing with semantic. Building links refers to the ugly link creation based on silly work while earning links refers to link creation based on merit but at the end, this is still a link quest, isn't it?

Since the beginning it was always Earning because the QUALITY LINKS CAN'T BE BUILT IT CAN ONLY BE EARNED. But during the previous years google and all other search engines were only counting the numbers so everyone started building links where it takes only 2-5 minutes to make your back link alive for example Directories, Social bookmarks, 2 way exchange etc.

After the Penguin when google has announced it's watching the Anchors and Quality of the links, people started the earning process once again by offering something Unique, exciting and interesting in terms of either Content on the guest blogs or surveys anything that can earn some links. When we earn links it also diversify our Anchor making back link profile more natural.

There's much more safety in natural link acquisition, this is true. Would you agree with me that there are things worth doing even if it results in 0 links? Qualified traffic and more awareness with the target audience are goals worth pursuing with or without links.

I might even take it a step further and would remove the term "SEO" in regards to anything that isn't related to on-page optimization or using analytical data to help gain visibility. I believe the industry is at the point in which SEO is synonomus with "link building", "anchor text matching", "deep links", "fast results" and for companies who have been burned by Google, "spam and scam".

SEO(off-page) at this point should be called "organic brand building" or "digital trust building" (not the best sounding names). Reputation management, customer service (email, phone, social media), great content (both on-site and guest posts), outreach, targeted copy, design and community growth (blog, social media, forums, etc) should be ways to increase website and brand authority, instead of getting the 1533rd link in a wikipedia page about dentures.

I've actually recently removed "SEO" from my personal profiles wherever I could find and change it, so I agree with you personally. I couldn't prescribe removing "SEO," though, because it's often the most descriptive term for an agency. I think we might also be able to salvage the term, especially that Google is putting one nail after another in the coffins of spam-generating agencies. I guess we'll have to wait and see :)

Hey Carson,thank you for your nice, thoughtful and analytical writing. Really you said the right thing about link building. We should not only focus on the link building process for SEO but also do the other things perfectly for better ranking.

I for one am certainly not willing to let the term "link-building" go to the spammers, if you have been keeping up on sites like Moz and others in the SEO industry they have been talking about inbound marketing concepts for a while now. The term "link-building" doesn't need to change because links are still really important, but the term has changed in meaning to encompass all ways to get links, specifically now authentic links gained legitimately!

At our agency we have moved roughly 40-50% of our "link-building" resources to revolve around creating; targeted, well-researched, engaging content (mostly blogs) that is then promoted through social to get; traffic, engagements, shares, and links. This is still link building in my mind but it had evolved, now the PRIMARY goal is to create real content that will drive real customers; the secondary benefit being the social shares & back links.

But there are still tolls out there telling us that link building is a lifetimes job. Our website Scandinavia companies and market changed from .se to com. Due to our poor knowledge on web development all the links .se had acquired, more than a 100 top rated lives we lost all that. I have been commissioned t build link. It so tiring. Well I hope to learn some new techniques beginning the insight have gained from this post.

I agree now days link building looks a spam technique and people aren't appreciate it, but what can you say about this post "http://goo.gl/W22sh" as Matt Cutts said "Link building is still a legal way to get page rank and traffic to your website".

Nice perspective on changing our views of link building. But I believe you're kicking a few open doors here: Content is king, and there's no denying that. In that sense, you're talking about earning links and this is obviously true as no one would be willing to link to a poorly made page, with poor content. On the other side, building awesome content without chasing after links isn't effective either. People aren't just going to stumble upon your great article or infographic unless you put things in motion for it to be discovered. That is what link building means, IMO. We might rename it at some point, but we certainly won't stop doing it, don't you think?

Thanks for the comment, but my point was not "build it and they will come," "content is king," or "earn links." I'm not sure how people got this impression.

"I see no reason why our efforts and successes should be constrained by links. Some online marketing tactics may also contribute directly to rankings, and some definitely contribute directly to traffic." (or other business goals)

Unless all we care about and all we do is build links, why call it link building? Why force ourselves to stop being marketers the instant followed links are no longer involved?

i am not agree with you dear . google also love links . you are saying bookies language that do or don't .. but reality is google right now giving preference links . and links like blogspot, wordpress blog, bookmarking , social sites(pintrest)

I can't help but notice that Moz's very own Search Engine Correlation Data shows the characteristics of web pages that tend to rank higher. Notice that out of the top 18 criteria, 17 are regarding the profile of inbound links.

At the top of the list is PA; one of the top criteria for measuring PA is linkcounts and MozRank. And, as you know, MozRank is that "which represents a link popularity score." The one that isn't really related to links is the + of G+1s. However, that in itself is a popularity contest as well, not too unlike links.

So, I cannot help but wonder if everybody's support on removing the link building from our vocabulary is really more band wagon hopping than actual acknowledgement to the factors that contribute to SERP. I also cannot help but wonder how many people who comment are blog writers with a day time job vs an actual ecommerce chap who has money on the shelf that needs to be sold immediately. When you invest your own money, you have a proverbial gun to your head to sell, sell, sell. I might be completely wrong, since I am not a blogger, but I do not see that being the case with bloggers.

Moz's Search Engine Correlation Data

Page Authority (PA) 0.39

# of Google +1's 0.30

# Unique cblocks Linking to the Page 0.29

# of Unique IPs Linking to the Page 0.29

# of Root Domains Linking to the Page 0.29

# of Root Domains Linking to Page w/ Partial Match Anchor Text 0.29

# of Subdomains Linking to the Page 0.28

# of Root Domains Linking to Page w/ Exact Match Anchor Text 0.28

# Unique cblocks w/ Followed Links to the Page 0.28

# Unique IPs with Followed Links to the Page 0.28

# of Unique Domains w/ Followed Links to a Page 0.28

# of External Links to the Page (included Followed And Nofollowed) 0.28

I like how Carson elaborated his points in comprehensive manner and it gave me lots of ideas to hone my SEO strategies.

However, most of my clients before were start-ups and basically no idea of SEO. One of the first actions I make before is to submit a site to legit directories. From there I could create new tactics on how to leverage site promotion and link acquisition.

I build links not to purposely rank a keyword but rather to reference a website or webpage that could be useful for people in specific industry because I think if you're site is "honest" enough it would eventually get rankings it deserve.

In a nutshell, I think link building shouldn't be removed from an SEO's vocabulary - it should be redefined.

Very informative writing, I also think Natural Link Earning is best thing, so try and build your brands with quality back links rather than building additional links, as a result of whole can generate leads rather than generating rankings! and it'll stay long and facilitate you! As you can see my blog mbbs lecture slides, I am just focusing on quality writing and providing maximum material rather then just posting my site to the blogs.

I think Natural Link Building is best things! Try to Build your brands with quality back links instead of building more links, because brand will generate leads instead of generating rankings! and it will remain long and help you!

Spot-on post Carson, very well written. Link Building as a specific activity is so last-decade, makes me cringe every time I hear about a business either doing it as a specific activity themselves or outsourcing it to an agency as a specific paid-for activity.

The best way to obtain links, the right kind of links that is (we all know what defines those), is to forget about link building and concentrate on the simple basics, Content Marketing! Awesome relevant new & unique content, written for a known, reachable & engageable audience, marketed smartly. Also, a thanks to Co-citation!

Regards of the term that's used, most businesses would like to rank for keywords that the vast majority of it's users are searching for to make a profit.

The whole "link building" vs "link acquisition" to me is more of a philosophy. We don't want to be narrow sighted to only be focused on getting X link in Y amount of time. "Acquisition" to me implies that you can use other marketing strategies to gain visibility in search engines while focusing on the end user. Ultimately, that would make everyone branch out at overall digital marketing instead of being really focused on only link-building.

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True, it's a huge part of what we talk about! The problem with "link building" or even "link earning" is that the terms create an implied goal of links, sometimes at the expense of other marketing goals that matter more.

I'm a newbee to online marketing, and I got a bit lost with some of the jargon in this blog.

Can somebody PLEASE help me?

Maybe give me a simple breakdown of what Carson is saying what NOT to do, and then what TO DO instead? Quick bullet points, or something. I feel that what he says is really valuable, and I want to learn from this lesson.

Many in this industry are so focused on the factor of links that we fail to look at other ranking factors and other methods of revenue. The long and short of it is this: do real marketing rather than trying to influence Google's ranking factors one at a time, and you'll find that you'll also see a corresponding rise in all of those factors.

If you can elaborate a little as to what confused you, it might be helpful for me, too. I sometimes forget that not everyone is reading from the same level: the curse of knowledge, I guess.

Great read, great article. I think moving forward in 2013 and beyond is going to be all about earning your links and building trust with the search engines, not just building 150 links a day regardless if they are awesome links or not, I think we are going to see the search engines pulling away some weight from this method. Just my 2 cents :p

Link Building obviously is not effective and has become history now but getting backlinks will always be an important factor in SEO. Yes i agree that Link Building by targetting some keywords donot exists anymore and its time of getting link through Content (guest post). This time only the form of link building has changed, it will take time to remove Link building completely from SEO Off page.

I, like a lot of other independent blog owners, has been hit my Google Penguin. This whole building spammy links started a couple of years ago for me and led me to really good rankings in the fitness and health niche. Sure I made money at the time but more importantly I felt I was helping a lot of people. After the hammer fell with Penguin I decided I really had to clean up my act and stop building and more links and instead earned them through building strong social presence personally on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Pinterest.

I have been adding content too but I can still stand behind the content that is already on the site that Google now ignores. I didn't build a small niche site and with 2500 great articles I think I offer a lot of value to anyone. I have a page on "how to lose weight fast", a golden term in the industry, that I used to rank #1 for and now rank 60-100th. The trouble is I constantly see people building crappy sites, using terrible techniques to build links, and then when that site gets dumped they just move on and build a new one. This strategy is leading to terrible content that will rank for a month or two and then get kicked out of the index.

I don't know if Google really cares about the quality like they say and I have just had to move on.

I only get a handful of clicks a day now from Google and they are my 9th or 10th highest referral source and I don't see this changing anytime soon as they refuse to look at content quality anymore.

"links are not the goal; they are merely one outcome and benefit of marketing with the goal of profitability."

I imagine that if site owners cared less about building and counting links fewer sites would have run afoul of Penguin. Like anything else that is supposed to help your website do better organically, link building has been pushed to the edge of acceptability. Links did (and do) matter so sites tried to build as many as they possibly could. Now the tides are changing so it's not as easy to get away with using shoddy links to get to the top of the SERPs.

I agree with you, but shouldn't be "building content" coming before :) ?... and, better not calling it "building content", or we could fall in the same myopic way of thinking of link building for link building.

If I removed link building from my SEO strategy, all my little clients sites would fail, they can't spend $1,000 on content each month then market it to build up natural links and rankings, link building is the only affordable alternative for them to rank.

That's completely not true - if your definition of link building is the kind of "placed" links where the content on the site being linked to is ultimately irrelevant with regards to the placement of the link - essentially a link "any site could get".

You can do content and decent sustainable link building on small budgets - you just have to go slower and think smaller. Check out this video from Ade Lewis who talks about how he does it for 350 pounds per month http://www.distilled.net/store/ll-2013-lewis/

If linkbuilding is not all about ranking than what is it.The point is we need to build links wisely.I shall not say this story is wrong or anything in it is not right.The point is at this point we need backlinks,the point is how we build them.If we build them wisely it with throw us traffic which we exactly need.
A Press release with some insipring real updates from Company will surely send the visitor and a link also.